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McBurney, Mona (Margaret)locked

McBurney, Mona (Margaret)locked

  • Faye Patton

(b Douglas, Isle of Man, July 29, 1862; d Melbourne, Dec 4, 1932). Australian composer. She received early musical training in Edinburgh with MacKenzie before emigrating to Australia with her family. Her brother, Samuel McBurney, completed the doctorate in music in Dublin and became an authority on solfège. She studied at the University of Melbourne (BMus 1896), becoming the first female graduate in music. Her early distinction as a composer grew with the completion of her opera, The Dalmatian, which gained her a reputation as the first Australian woman opera composer. From 1918 she taught languages at the University Conservatorium, Melbourne, as well as teaching the piano privately. At the time of her death she had completed 40 works.

McBurney was drawn to Nordic and classical themes in her programmatic and vocal music. Her larger-scale compositions reveal a mixture of influences, including 19th-century German Romanticism and English choral music. Her songs, written in the style of the English and French art song, and her idiomatic piano pieces were well known during her lifetime; The Dalmatian and A Northern Ballad, a fantasy for piano and orchestra, were also performed several times.

Works

(selective list)

Inno à Dante, chorus, orch, 1902

A Bardic Ode, hp, pf, c1905

The Dalmatian (op, 3, McBurney, after F.M. Crawford), 1905

A Northern Ballad, pf, orch, c1908, lost, arr. 2 pf, pubd; Song on May Morning, SSAATB, c1912

An Elizabethan Madrigal (N. Downes), 1920

pf pieces, mostly lost

c30 songs and duets

Bibliography

  • AusDB, x (F. Patton)
  • F. Patton: ‘Rediscovering our Musical Past: the Works of Mona McBurney and Florence Donaldson Ewart’, Sounds Australian, no.19 (1989), 10–12
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Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne, 1966-96)
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Parkville, Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne